


A Quiet Front

by curious_werewolf, themastersbeard



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1940s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Artist Steve Rogers, Baseball, Bisexual Howard stark, Brooklyn, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Grief, Historical Accuracy, M/M, Post-World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-29 17:36:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15078230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curious_werewolf/pseuds/curious_werewolf, https://archiveofourown.org/users/themastersbeard/pseuds/themastersbeard
Summary: Brooklyn EagleWEATHER- Sunny, cool today; clear, cool tonight.106th Year - No.315 - DAILY and SUNDAY - Brooklyn 1, N.Y. Friday, November 15, 1946CAPTAIN AMERICA DISCOVERED-- ALIVE!New York, November 15th (UP) - Army officials have confirmed that Brooklyn’s own Captain Steven Grant Rogers, commonly known as ‘Captain America’, has been found alive. He was recovered unconscious from the wartime wreckage discovered on 11 November by Stark Industries Founder and Chief Executive Office Howard Stark.





	A Quiet Front

**Author's Note:**

> Art by enormously talented curious_werewolf, story by themastersbeard.
> 
> Betaing by my lovely friends, y'all know who you are.
> 
> Fic will benefit from watching Agent Carter (bisexual!Howard Stark), but it's not required.

**_Brooklyn Eagle_ ** ****  
WEATHER- Fair, cool tonight; sunny, cool tomorrow  
106th Year - No.312 - DAILY and SUNDAY - Brooklyn 1, N.Y. Tuesday, November 12, 1946

**WARTIME WRECKAGE DISCOVERED IN ARCTIC**

New York, November 12th (UP) - Army Officials said today that wreckage had been found on a expedition to the Arctic. The discovery was made by Stark Industries Founder and Chief Executive Officer Howard Stark. Mr. Stark had been in the employ of the Government as a weapons manufacturer and engineer during the course of the War, and was recently involved in a high-profile search after he was accused of selling weapons to the enemies of the United States. Mr Stark was cleared of all charges and was granted a personal pardon from President Truman himself, who was quoted saying: “Mr. Stark is an example to each of us of a true American Patriot…”

**Continued on Page 12**

 

 **_Brooklyn Eagle_ ** ****  
WEATHER- Sunny, cool today; clear, cool tomorrow.  
106th Year - No.313 - DAILY and SUNDAY - Brooklyn 1, N.Y. Wednesday, November 13, 1946

**STARK WORKING WITH CANADIAN GOVERNMENT-- SOVIET FEARS GROW**

New York, November 13th (UP) - Wartime wreckage which was discovered yesterday by Stark Industries Founder and Chief Executive Officer Howard Stark was part of plan to ensure North American sovereignty. Mr. Stark, it has now been reported, was executing surveillance over ice-sheets in the Canadian Arctic with the assistance of that country’s government. The vulnerability of the Canadian Arctic, one source says, has been of growing concern to the United States’ government as tensions between the Government and the USSR grows in the wake of Marshall’s European reconstruction efforts…

**Continued on Page 22**

 

 **_Brooklyn Eagle_ ** ****  
WEATHER- Cloudy, cool today; clearing; cool tonight.  
106th Year - No.314 - DAILY and SUNDAY - Brooklyn 1, N.Y. Thursday, November 14, 1946

**BODY RECOVERED FROM STARK’S WARTIME WRECKAGE**

New York, November 14th (UP) - Army Officials in a brief to reporters late last night revealed that a body had been recovered from wartime wreckage discovered by Stark Industries Founder and Chief Executive Officer Howard Stark. No information on the possible identity of the pilot has been made public, but army sources note that some eighty-thousand American soldiers remain officially Missing in Action….

**Continued on Page 11**

 

 **** **_Brooklyn Eagle_**  
WEATHER- Sunny, cool today; clear, cool tonight.  
106th Year - No.315 - DAILY and SUNDAY - Brooklyn 1, N.Y. Friday, November 15, 1946

**CAPTAIN AMERICA DISCOVERED-- ALIVE!**

New York, November 15th (UP) - Army officials have confirmed that Brooklyn’s own Captain Steven Grant Rogers, commonly known as ‘Captain America’, has been found alive. He was recovered unconscious from the wartime wreckage discovered on 11 November by Stark Industries Founder and Chief Executive Office Howard Stark.

Mr. Stark has yet to the comment on the discovery, and speculation is rife as to how Cpt. Rogers, who disappeared on 7 March, 1945 survived the ordeal. Some sources have speculated off-record that the wreckage contained classified experimental energy systems, which could have provided the fuel to warm the craft for several years...

**Continued on Page 2**

 

 **** **_Brooklyn Eagle_**  
WEATHER- Increasing cloudiness tonight; warmer tomorrow.  
106th Year - No.316 - DAILY and SUNDAY - Brooklyn 1, N.Y. Saturday, November 16, 1946

**CAPTAIN AMERICA RECOVERING, MR. STARK SPEAKS OUT; BARNES’ SILENT**

New York, November 16th (UP) - Brooklyn’s Capt. Steven Grant Rogers, War hero and movie star colloquially known as ‘Captain America’, now reported to be recovering in hospital at an undisclosed location. Stark Industries Founder, Howard Stark spoke to reporters late last night via telephone, saying: “It’s nothing short of a bonafide miracle-- you can quote me on that!” He was elusive when questioned on the specifics of the discovery, only noting that more details would be forthcoming when Captain Rogers had regained his health.

    The Eagle reached out to the family of the late Sergeant James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes of Brooklyn Heights for comment on the developing story, but were told that the family does not wish to speak to media at present. Sergeant James Barnes was the childhood best friend of Captain Rogers and his mother was listed as Captain Rogers’ Next of Kin at the time of his disappearance. Sergeant Barnes was KIA on 23 February 1945, mere weeks before Captain Rogers himself...

**Continued on Page 2**

  


**June, 1934**

Steve stretches his hand. He flexes his fingers and Bucky, always a quip dancing at the tip of his tongue these days, snorts.

“Tired, Steve?” he says, grinning with all his teeth. “‘Cause it feels like I’m the one doing all the work here.”

Steve rolls his eyes pointedly, and picks up the stick of charcoal again. He’s been trying lately to get things down permanently, less erasing, less fixation on the precision of elusive perfection.

Bucky doesn’t get it, not really, but he humours Steve all the same. He’s a good pretender, and plays at being a worker, at sleeping, at being a model in a clothing advert. He’s stretching now against the railing of the fire escape in his shirt-sleeves, tilting his face towards the sun and curving his arm along the railing.

There’s sweat shining on his brow and the hair behind his ears curls damply. Steve wants to press his face to it and breath in.

It’s been a sick compulsion that had struck weeks back, when Bucky had been running track and Steve had been watching and Bucky had bent to tie his shoe. He’d been talking a mile a minute about Gloria, the latest dame whose skirt he was chasing, but all Steve could focus on the way his tee-shirt rode up, showing a sliver of his pale back and the sharp ridge of his spine. And all he could think of now was skin, skin, skin.

Privately, Steve was hoping that it was one of his fleeting obsessions that comes on quickly, and leaves just as fast as it had arrived. Last summer it had been the Betty and Bob radio soap [1] which he’d listened to devotedly for two months before getting sick of Bob Drake altogether and dropping the show.

He figured he’d be getting sick of thinking about Bucky’s dumb hair soon too. It was just a matter of when.

And until then, he was pointedly trying to ignore Bucky in favour of some more practical pursuits. Because it looked like asthma, rheumatic fever, and a heart murmur had all failed at doing him in, and he’d have to decide sooner rather than later what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Commercial art or illustration seemed as good a choice as any, and besides, Steve had never been good at listening to the rules in school.

The ignoring was only half-working.

He refocuses on the charcoal, and drags it slowly across the thick paper of his sketchbook. The squaring of Bucky’s shoulders, the way his tie was occasionally whipped up by the wind. It was hard to capture movement, harder still to capture the sheer liveliness that Bucky exuded.

Bucky was still talking. Al Lopez and the Summer Classic. Whether the Dodgers would reach .500 this season. Beck’s ERA had jumped from three-point-five-something last year to over ten this summer. 2   Had he lost his magic?

And maybe Steve had forgotten momentarily about the ignoring-Bucky bit, because he could have sworn he was still working on getting the flap of his tie in the wind down on paper, but he was suddenly aware of the silence and the fact that he had fixated on the way Bucky had sweated through his shirt where it was rucked up around his bicep.

And Bucky had certainly noticed, because he was looking at Steve a little queerly. His face was curiously blank, and Steve was struck by panic at the thought that Bucky, behind the impassive glance and straight mouth, had seen straight through him and knew what Steve was all about.

“I think Ownie Carroll is on the outs,” Bucky says carefully, breaking the silence.

And Steve, grappling for an escape, says “I’d be happy if the Reds took him back.”

But he can’t shake the feeling of panic. And he doesn’t ever stop noticing Bucky’s dumb hair.

**1945**

The plane goes down. The Allies win the war.

 

**November, 1946**

His vision is funny when he peels his eyes open. He’s so cold it burns and he’s shaking all over. Something pricks at his left hand, and try as he can, he can’t turn to look. His limbs are leaden. His tongue is cotton in his mouth.

Someone puts a warm towel around his head and shushes him.

-

He wakes up in his fits. There’s an IV in his arm. He tugs it out clumsily and it’s put back in. He sleeps.

-

“Water,” he tries to say for the sixth time, but his tongue won’t work right. His legs are still trembling beneath the woolen blankets. He can’t stop shaking.

-

“He’s burning through IV bags,”

Someone tuts.

“Haven’t seen anything like it, and I was med evac, you know.”

Someone huffs softly.

-

The next time he wakes up it’s less effort to peel his eyes open. He twitches the fingers of his left hand, feels them respond. His legs have stopped shaking against the bed, but everything aches in a way it hasn’t since he’d had rheumatic fever.

It takes him a moment to realise he’s not alone. There’s a faint pressure where someone has pressed against the side of the bed. They murmur quietly, and it takes him a moment to realise it’s not English.

He twists his head in fractions, painstakingly slow and with each tendon afire.

It’s Howard Stark. Steve recognises the slope of his eyebrows, the dark crown of his head.

It’s Yiddish, he realises a beat later. The language is Yiddish.

Howard Stark is praying. Steve hadn’t even known he was Jewish.

Howard’s shoulders tremble.

Steve closes his eyes. He stops twitching his left hand. He has the sick sense of walking in on something deeply personal.

He allows sleep to tug him under once more.

-

The next time he awakes, his vision is clear.

“Oh good,” someone says, and this time he can place the voice: a matronly nurse. “Are you in pain?”

“Cold,” he says, and it’s slurred, but it comes out.

“Of course, dear.”

Howard shows up. Or perhaps he’d never left. He’s shoves his hands into his pockets, and rocks back on his heels.

“Cap,” he says, and his mouth tugs up a little more at the right side than the left. “--Pal, have we ever got a story to tell you.”

-

He’s been in the ice for over a year. It’s a miracle that he’d survived-- and that was Howard’s word: _Miracle._

Howard is beside himself. There’s going to be press conferences-- a whole circuit. _Cap, you lucky sonuvabitch_ and Howard can’t seem to stop touching him, as if ensuring that he’s real. Warm fingers at his shoulder, prodding at his head, patting his knee.

When he leaves Steve can’t catch his breath. It makes the machines hum nervously. His fingers itch for something-- his rosary? Bucky? Peggy? But his thinking is confused and sluggish.

He’s in the hospital for weeks.

“Peg visited, Cap.” Howard is at his bedside again, he’s tanned and healthy-looking in his grey suit and looks amiss among the white sheets and pale blue blankets. “But you were asleep.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?” Steve asks, voice cracking a bit at the end.

Howard runs the back of his hand over his moustache, before he smiles faintly and gives a half-hearted shrug.

“You need your rest, pal.”

 

**December, 1946**

He gets out of the hospital the same week that the first blanket of snow covers Manhattan. It temporarily conceals the grime of the streets and the sooty tops of roofs.

“Don’t worry,” Howard says, clapping a hand to Steve’s back. “We’ve got you all kitted up back home.”

He’s not wrong, exactly.

Except the house he pulls out in front is a brownstop just a stone-throw from Ebbets Field and Prospect Park, and something that Steve could never have dreamed of before the war.

“Ain’t she grand, Cap? Picked her out myself,” Howard is grinning like a cat that got the cream. “Mr. Jarvis helped.” he adds, only as an afterthought.

And boy, is she grand. Two stories with stained glass above the front door and a wooden staircase that curves up to the second floor.

Steve blows a whistle through his teeth when he sees the washroom: toilet, wash-basin, bathtub all in one room.

He almost smiles thinking what Bucky would say.

Imagine this, Buck, he thinks. A toilet that you don’t gotta share with the eight Murphys across the hall. Swell, ain’t it?

Bucky would say: are you sure your socialist sensibilities allow for such grandeur, Steve-o? He’d secretly be pleased, Steve was sure.

But it’s strange to live alone after so long of living in Bucky’s pocket.

It’s stranger still to be back from the war and find Brooklyn relatively unchanged. He spends a lot of time hanging out of his bedroom window, looking out to the bare branches of the trees which peak out over the walls of Prospect Park.

He likes lighting a cigarette and watching the smoke climb up into the muggy sky, only occasionally taking a drag.

No more bombs, no more bullets, no more goddamn bonds. Just the honking of a distant taxi on Ocean Avenue and the barking of raccoons, burrowing through a garbage can.

It’s hard to get used to quiet

-

Howard stops by on Tuesdays in Aston Martins waxed to a shine despite the winter slush. He takes Steve out to lunches in Midtown and once to dinner at the the _21 Club_ [ **3**] where Steve meets Ginger Rogers.

It’s a pecularily humbling experience and one that leaves him feeling small and painfully awkward.

The Howlies trickle in one by one, too. Gabe first, and then Dum Dum. It’s harder for Jim who sends him a line in the post from Cali and for Falsworth, who’s gotten involved in local politics back in Britain.

“We were real torn up, Cap,” Dum Dum tells him, but he says it lightly, as he does with most things.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says. He’s got a queer feeling building up behind his sternum and threatening to choke him. He tries to focus on the way Dum Dum packs tobacco into his pipe.

“In March? Me and the rest of the fellas met up out in Arlington,” He brings the pipe up to his mouth, and takes a test draw from behind his slightly greying mustache. Satisfied, he brings up a match to light it. “Like I said, real torn up, Cap. Drank whiskey at yours and Barnes’ ceremonial bullshit fucking graves and everything. Poured you a goddamn toast.”

Steve, can’t say anything. The pressure behind his sternum is overwhelming. His hands are shaking and he tries desperately to cover it by clenching his sweaty fingers over his knees.

“Waste of goddamn whiskey, it seems, eh?”

Steve laughs, and feels the mucus run down the back of throat.

-

“Christmas party,” Howard says, waving his hand expansively as if willing Steve to imagine the prospect. “There’ll be music, food, girls, more music, and did I mention the girls, Cap?”

He has a paper invitation for Steve too, on heavy-cardstock with swirly writing and hand-delivered by a courier. But in this, as with most things, Howard liked to put on a show

He has a tuxedo hand-delivered to Steve the day of the party by courier too.

It comes with a tailor who is ready to make any last-minute alterations and hovers over Steve like a particularly overzealous magpie in his black hat and pressed white shirt.

He’d never actually owned a suit that fit before the war. Bucky had his blue suit for Church and funerals, tailored and neat at the collar and across the breadth of his shoulders. Steve had a tie, a few ill-fitting linen button-downs, and a jacket that was threadbare at the elbows and cuffs. That’s what he had worn to his mother’s funeral.

The suit they’ve brought him now fits. He flips it inside out, tugs out the sleeves to examine the clean stitches of the lining. It’s opulent. Very much so. The stitching on the russet satin is tight, and the tailor’s label has been carefully tucked at the neck and left breast.

He picks up the telephone-- and wasn’t that a hoot still?-- His own goddamn telephone. And he rings Howard.

“I can’t wear this,” Steve says.

“Don’t be a goose,” Howard says, but he sounds distracted. “Of course you can wear it.”

So he wears it. He twists the mother of pearl cufflinks on the way he’d once watched Bucky do his and slicks his hair back with Murray’s, which is tacky and blissfully unchanged.

And Howard’s party-- if you could even call it that-- turns out to be an occasion where one certainly does need a tailored suit. There are well-placed security men at the doors and walking the dance-floor stiffly. And this certainly isn’t the sort of thing the Barnes’ hosted at their house at New Years or birthdays. There’s an actual big band set up with a trumpeter and upright bass and a man crooning in style after Bing Crosby. PThere are even couples dancing Bal which was a solidly Californian thing, and something he hadn’t seen in person other than the time Morita had taught it to Bucky.[ **4**]

And for the number of people here, all with hair stylishly oiled, it’s surprisingly easy to find Howard who amasses an audience wherever he wanders.

“Cap,” he says, a girl hanging off his arm. He gestures to the blonde: “Judith,” and then back to Steve: “Captain Rogers.”

“How d’you do?” she asks primly, extending one gloved hand which Steve shakes self-consciously.

“And Mark Kaminski, her cousin,” Howard gestures to a good looking and sleakly-dressed young man to his right.[ **5**]

Rinse, repeat. He can’t look anywhere except at the faint jut of the right shoulder-pad of Judith's dress.

“Well, Cap,” Howard says conspiratorially. “Places to be, you know.” And then, lower still. “Our mutual friend is around here somewhere. Ask her to dance. The band knows a tune or two.” And then he winks, actually winks, and is off.

He doesn’t spot Peggy. He doesn’t spot anyone he knows, but he spots a lot of people who know him. Politicians who clamber around for photos shaking his hand.

“We’re very much looking forward to your continued service,” one says, paunchy and balding, and his palm sweating in Steve’s grasp. “Tricky business with the Russians, tricky business…”

Even that doesn’t rile him, and what would Bucky say if he could see him now: “Cat finally got your tongue, Rogers?”

Instead he allows himself to be buffeted from table to table. He’s forced into a dance with the daughter of a South American ambassador. He stumbles through with increasing panic, before he manages to flee, to both their gratitude, towards the punch fountain.

He spends the rest of the night nursing champagne after champagne, and would have amassed a considerable collection of flutes if not for their prompt removal by the wait staff. They have no effect. The band’s singer moves to the bar where he’s plied with drinks. Honest-to-goodness Jo Stafford, or else a frighteningly good look-a-like, has taken his place and croons to the room in her deep, clear voice.

“I thought he was really handsome, you know?” the wife of so-and-so very important person says. She’s clutching his sleeve. “Your friend in the newsreels? So handsome he could have been a movie star, I always said. Didn’t I, Hank? Such a shame.”

He doesn’t leave then, he waits. Jo Stafford has begun to sing Manhattan Serenade[ **6**] and all he can think is how Bucky had changed the lyrics once, when stuck for days by the weather in Yugoslavia. The line about the handle-bars had remained the same, but the others he’d mangled until they were raunchy, featured cruising at night in Prospect Park, and redubbed Brooklyn Serenade. 

The conversation segues and then Steve slinks away, head down, and fingers tightening around another flute of champagne. He doesn’t stop until he’s outside on the the paved terrace, and then drains it in one long go.

Bucky _had_ been handsome as a movie star, no matter how much Steve had ribbed him about his attempts to play at being a sub-par Cary Grant.

His throat is suddenly tight and he has to choke down bile. What was Becca doing now? Or Roy?

He wonders if Mrs. Barnes still had the service banner strung in their front window. It’s blue star would be gold now.

He hurls the flute with full force. It shatters distantly against some unseen pot or paved walkway.

“Oh, you public menace.” he hadn’t heard her approach, and that frightens him. “Defacing private property is a crime, Captain Rogers.”

He can’t think to respond. He’s struggling to even his laboured breathing. It’s the return of countless summer nights when the air had been dank and heavy in their Brooklyn flat and he’d alternated between unending coughing and unending gagging.

Peggy doesn’t say anything. She leans on the marble bannister and looks out into the dark of the garden.

He doesn’t know her well enough to read her expression.

It’s beginning to mist as he pulls out a cigarette case and taps one out. It’s two tries before he manages to light it. He sucks a breath in, holds it.

“I think he can stand to replace it.”

Peggy huffs. It’s a wry sort of half-laugh and startling in the dark.

“Replace it and then some, you mean?” She snatches the cigarette from between his fingers and takes a drag. Steve watches the smoke trail upwards with her next breath. It curls higher and higher still before it’s dispelled by the wind.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I didn’t.” she says. “ _Before_.”

It hangs there in the air between them unsaid. The Before of the Blitz. Or the Bulge. Or the War. Or the previous year. He knows what _before_ is down to his core.

“You know, there are more stars in Hampshire,” she’s looking up now, hair falling back from her face. “Is it always like this in New York?”

 “The City? Yes.” A breath. “Brooklyn too.”

 “Come back with me, Steve.” she looks away from the sky and back to him and he feels the way he did before-- small and unsure and all of five-foot-nothing. “Stop sulking.”

 “Peg.”

 She takes it for what it is, turning to leave with a flourish of her skirt. He watches her dark head recede, and then lights another cigarette.

-

He spends Christmas alone, drinking warmed up broth and shovelling snow from his front walk. He shovels the snow for the neighbours too. Then, feeling very nearly tired, he turns on the wireless and listens to Bing Crosby before the fireplace in the sitting room.

-

There’s a motorcycle parked on his front lawn the next morning. Someone’s carefully tied a glossy red ribbon around it’s seat, and dusted their footsteps from the snow, giving the appearance that it had simply sprung forth as if by magic.

The gift-tag dispels the fancy.

_From Howard. Happy belated Christmas. See you on the other side of 1947._

It’s gaudy and golden, but the scrawling piecemeal writing is Howard’s own. This in itself surprises Steve. If there were anything he had learned the past few weeks it’s that Howard exerts minimal effort in everything but his work.

A motorcycle for Christmas, extravagant in the extreme-- “Whatever you want, pal.” Howard had said once. It’s a far throw from the baseball cards and stockings full of oranges that he and Bucky had traded as children. And it’s beautiful, Steve admits, all polished chrome and leather-detailing. But something about it sits uncomfortably upon his conscience. And he wonders, perhaps not for the first time, how many Howard could truly call friends.

He stares at that tag for a long while.

The envelope he doesn’t find until the following morning when he goes to collect the post. It’s unmarked, but the paper is too cheap to be anything from Howard. There’s a single coin inside, which he taps out onto his palm.

A Stork Club Lucky Penny dated 1946.[ **7**]

It could have been there since the night of the 23rd and he’d been none the wiser. He turns it over in his hand, looks down to Lincoln’s unseeing face, and then back again to the wheat sheafs.

He finds it difficult to think of little else but the coin for the remainder of the day. And as he had once before, age sixteen, spotty and awkward, and unsure of himself, he’s struck by the realisation that the rest of his life lies ahead. The world wouldn’t stop turning for Bucky Barnes. The world didn’t give a damn.

And you’re a damn fool, Rogers, Bucky says somewhere from the past.

And he was being a damn fool.

He doesn’t do anything about it for several days. He spends days cooking potato stews that he eats alone, he rings Howard to say thank you, he waffles and hems and haws.

On New Years Eve it snows lightly, and he spends the day sketching the spindly outlines of shoppers legs on Atlantic Avenue.  The crowds get denser as evening falls like a cloak upon the city. It’s cold, but not unreasonably so, and he smokes a cigarette outside the awning of a butcher’s that has closed for the holidays. He wishes, not for the first time, that he could still get drunk.

Get it over with, Steve, Bucky says, like a familiar ghost. You pick a fight with any guy twice your size in the Heights, but you’re too scared to talk to a dame?

He chucks the cigarette to the pavement, grinds the smoking butt beneath his heel. There’s a telephone booth where Atlantic meets Pennsylvania Avenue, and he fishes a nickel out of his pocket as he nears it.

Howard’s not home. That’s unsurprising. Jarvis is, and gives him an address which he writes down with a stubby pencil in the back of his sketchbook.

He shows up unannounced on the back of the gifted motorcycle.

The house is lavish. A gift from Howard, with his bottomless pockets. There’s a proper doorbell, which he rings while he fiddles with the box of matches in his pocket.

Peggy answers in her dressing gown, a scarf tied around her hair.

“A bad penny always turns up,” he says.

**January, 1947**

The New Year dawns much the same as the old year had died. Tepid temperature, fat flakes drifting by lazily, and in no seeming hurry to stick to the ground. Peggy’s knit beret sits at an angle on her head, but she’s undone the top button of her jacket, and her gloves had come off within minutes of being outside.

She lives in a nice neighbourhood. It’s clean, and quiet. It’s strange to see her in the City. In his mind she is always tramping through the mud of France, gun at her hip, or else clicking down the cobblestone of London streets. Unflappably English and always cool-headed.

Steve’s heart swells when he looks at her, and he wonders if this small fact is a betrayal of the life he has lived till now.

She doesn’t make any indication that she realises his inward turmoil. She’s graceful, and whip-smart, and hard as steel.

He might very well be with her on a mission again, so familiar does it feel to walk at her side. It muddies the space between the War and the After further than anything else has the past few weeks.

“What are you thinking?” she asks. “You’ve got that look about you.”

“That I’m thankful that I have friends willing to put me up in their guest-room.”

“Is that so?” she says it lightly, but it stops him short.

“That this is the Barnes’ second holidays without him,” and that’s the closest to the truth that he dares venture.

He sees her inhale, as if steadying herself, but when she looks to him it’s soft.

“It’s the fourth holidays without my brother for my parents,” she lifts her handbag to fiddle briefly with the handle. “And the first without me, I suppose. Although I did post them a card.”

“Peg,” he tries, fails. “I didn’t know about your brother.”

“Sometimes the only way one can process the grief is by burying it. It’s not a good way to live, but well,” she smiles, small and wry, red lips curving to reveal a sliver of white teeth.

He wants to ask _Is that what you did with me?_ but it’s too intimate, both too much and too soon. Time has moved on, the shape of things have shifted in his absence and he’s no longer sure where he stands.

“Have you seen them?”

“No,” Steve passes a hand down over his face. “No.”

“Steve, I think they’d--”

“No.” he says, too abruptly to pass off as normal. “No, Peg. I don’t think they would.”

“You can’t know that,” her voice is filled with reproach.

“Yes, I can,” and he finds that he’s shaking again. That speaking has become difficult, fuzzy and incomprehensible. “Their son. Christ. Their oldest son-- he’s-- and I’m back. I crashed a damn plane and I’m back. It’s wrong, Peg.”

“That doesn’t mean you stop living. That doesn’t mean you damn well stop.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Like bloody hell I don’t understand.” she’s clutching his arm now, fingers digging discreetly into his wrist. If anyone were to see them, they would take them as no more than sweethearts. Peggy’s hold on him easily interpreted as that of a woman who needed guiding across a particularly slick patch of sidewalk. She was shielding him, even now. “I lost everything. Do you understand? Everything. You muddle through as best you can until it gets easier. Barnes wouldn’t have wanted you to spend the rest of your life moping about.”

“How would you know what he would have wanted?” Steve looks at her sharply. He doesn’t say his name, the pain, even after months, is too raw.

“Because I know he loved you.” her fingers tighten on his arm, and she speaks lower. “I _know_. You don’t have to hide around me, do you understand, Steve?” And then, more insistently: “Do you understand?”

“How do you know?” he asks thickly. He can’t look at her, his eyes burn and he scrubs at them roughly with the back of his hand.

“At the end. Barnes, Lord, he was awful. It was liking walking on glass around him, you never knew when you would get cut. And we all knew what his kill count was, we all saw the reports that he killed a man with a shot from two-thousand metres. Did you know that nobody in the entire war matched that?” Steve didn’t, and it must show on his face. “No. And then he would walk into a room, and you would look at him like he hadn’t just hung the moon and stars, but that they turned only because he was there to look up at them in wonder every night.”  

He wants to tell her what it was like on Sunday mornings with nothing to do. Bucky propped up in bed reading his collection of Little Blue Books: Life on Other Planets,  Einstein’s New Substance of Space Theory or else science-mags that he ordered in the mail. Because Bucky Barnes was whip-smart, with a head for numbers, even when he pretended he was dumber than he really was around the neighbourhood boys.  And that was part of it too, because Bucky had always been nicer-- no, gentler than Steve

“He was better than me,” he tells her, voice gone thick. “So much better.”

“The same has been said of you.”

-

“Sometimes when I’m out…” he pauses, weighs his next words. “I get so angry at people who are just going about their business. It feels like a betrayal, that they can just go on as if nothing’s happened.”

“I know.” she says. “Me too.”

-

“Two outs, top of the ninth, Peg. There’s two strikes on Henrich. I’m on my feet, Mrs. Barnes is on her feet. Henrich swings and misses and that’s the game! Except our catcher, Mickey goddamn Owen, misses it. It’s a goddamn passed ball,” the story still bites six years later. “Owen finally comes up with it, but Henrich is already at first. We lose the game 7-4. And the next day the damn Yankees take the World Series. Mrs. Barnes was so angry she was slamming pots around the kitchen. And all you heard in Brooklyn before Pearl Harbour for a good two months was “Dem fucking Bums”, mind you, that’s still what you hear in Brooklyn.[ **8**]

Peggy puts on her best sympathetic face.

-

They don’t say goodbye until that evening. It’s freezing and snow has begun to fall wetly to the pavement once more.

He walks her home, and there’s a moment of indecision on the doorstep. Steve’s unsure what to do with his hands, how to stand and feign normalcy. He does finally go in for a kiss on the cheek, only for Peggy to go in for a hug. They laugh and shift awkwardly until Steve works up the courage to try again, and this time kisses her squarely on the mouth. Her hair tickles his face when he reaches to curl a hand around the nape of her neck.

She doesn’t smell like Bucky. She doesn’t feel like him either. But it’s nice.

If he cries a little on the walk back, there’s nobody around to see it.

-

The wet weather continues through January while he goes back to work for the SSR. It’s unseasonably warm, and the dampness induces phantom fears of asthma attacks and nebulizers. It reminds Steve too of the winter weeks spent in Greece, then Yugoslavia, curled up around fellow soldiers to keep from freezing at night.

That was three years ago now, and the Brooklyn Eagle that he buys from a newspaper boy at the corner of Union and 8th is more concerned with the imminent possibility of a teachers’ strike. Little, it seems had changed about Governor Dewey’s particular brand of politics.

He broods on it as he catches the Seventh Avenue trolley, which takes him close enough to DUMBO that he broods on that as well. His ma would have told him to stop pulling a face, but as it is there’s nobody to say anything, and he continues into Manhattan without getting his ear tweaked.

Things in the SSR have changed too. The tech they’ve uncovered on the Valkyrie is _out of this world_ according to Chief Thompson. He does everything that’s asked of him, and only wishes he was doing more, because this is something he knows. He recognises the oak desks and maps and coded telegrams. It’s comforting in its familiarity.

If they asked him to jump, he would. It gives order and purpose to his life that he hasn’t felt since the War.

Jump, roll, turn over. What did Schmidt say in his last moments? Did he say anything about the Soviets? Was he in league with them?

Nothing. No. No. Repeat.

He was never skilled with infiltration in the war. Too big, too noticeable, too damn awkward. That had always been Bucky’s division, with his proficiency for languages and uncanny ability to fly under the radar. Peggy too. He’d always thought of them as two sides of some clandestine coin.

Privately, Steve isn’t sure what use they have for him.There are people there far more capable than him, but he’ll take it.

The work clears his mind. There’s less time to ruminate when he’s aiding in a sting operation, or pouring over registers of weapons that have been waylaid since the War.

After, he goes to the pictures with Peggy where they watch _The Postman Always Rings Twice_ and _Notorious_ , or else to diners where he introduces her to egg creams and onion rings.

And every evening, on the 4 train back to Brooklyn, he pulls out his new sketchbook and pencils and draws.

**February, 1947**

The end of January brings with it the same prickling anticipation it always had, despite the fact that he has spent nearly four years out of the borough.

“Is that all you Brooklyn boys do?” Peggy asks, trying and failing to hide a smile. “Think about baseball?”

Steve is indignant, and tries to splutter a response: “You just don’t understand the _significance_ of spring training, Peg. And besides, they might be bringing up Jackie Robinson from Montreal this year. Do you know what that would _mean?_ ”[ **9**]

Howard is on his side, in a manner of speaking.

“I’m going to Arizona,” he tells them over lunch. “And there’s two seats on my plane with your names on it.”

Peggy is sceptical: “What’s in Arizona?”

“What’s in Arizona she asks?” Howard says to the empty room, as if speaking to a hidden audience. “The Cactus League and the best damn team in Major League Baseball. That’s what’s in Arizona!”[ **10**]

Steve must make a face, because Howard pounces.

“You attack a man, in his own home, and mock his ball club?” Howard raises a finger while he speaks, moustache curling in affront. “Let me tell you something, Cap. The Giants are the oldest damn professional ball team in this City--”

And Howard would have continued, Steve expects, if Steve didn’t cough something that sounded suspiciously like “The Great Mistake of ‘98”[ **11**] under his breath.

Howard is scandalised.

“Okay, boys, don’t make me break things up. You won’t like it.”

Later that evening, there’s a knock at Steve’s door. It’s solid and rings harshly through the house. He isn’t expecting anyone. He freezes.

It’s a deliberate effort to try and calm the fever pitch ringing in his ears. Because a knock is not a bomb is not a bullet is not a tank. The knock may very well be Howard, who sometimes stops by for a round of cards and a finger of whiskey, or else to continue the debate on the Giants and Dodgers.

The knock, it turns out, is Roy Barnes, holding a wooden crate and looking a little droopy with rain.

“Hi Steve,” he says quite plainly. “Can I come in?”

And Steve for lack of anything to do, and with his heart in his throat, lets him in. Roy had always looked so much like Bucky around the eyes.

Roy takes his time, he scrapes his feet clean; he carefully sets down the crate and unwinds the scarf from around his neck. He hangs his coat neatly and then spreads out his hands as if to say “fancy seeing you here.”

“I’ll put the kettle on,” is what Steve says, because it’s what his mother would have said.

“Thanks,” says Roy, and he sets his tweed cap atop the coat stand. His red hair is trim and neat, same as ever.

There’s a calm openness about him, a plain surety that Bucky had in his quiet moments, and which seemed to have skipped the other Barnes siblings entirely. He helps Steve set a tray for tea without being asked, he searches the innumerable cupboards for the sugar bowl and saucers and it’s all so familiar Steve could choke on it.

“You hear they traded Galan to the Reds?” Roy asks.

“Ye-es. And it was a damn stupid move,” Steve says, suddenly incensed.

“Don’t let my mother hear you talking like that, Steve,” but Roy is smiling crookedly. “But it is a damn stupid move.”

“An up-and-down pitcher with a .207 batting average for a man who hits .307” Steve sets the tea on a tray. “Sure seems like we got the short end of the proverbial stick.”

“He has potential though.‘Least that’s what they’re all saying-- the knuckleheads at the bar.”

It’s remarkably easy to talk to him, in a way that it rightly shouldn’t be.

“How’s your mother?” Steve finally asks, when he’s worked up the courage.

“Oh, you know.” Roy plucks his glasses from his nose to give the lenses a once-over with his shirt sleeve. “Not great. Not bad, but not great. She wants you to visit.”

It’s a statement given at face-value. Steve worries the edge of the tablecloth between his fingers, twists it back and forth and then smooths it down once more.

“I’m sorry,” he says suddenly, thickly, and he finds he can’t finish the thought. His tongue has gone thick in his mouth.

Roy chews at the inside of his lip for a brief moment, before carefully replacing the glasses on his face.

“Wait one moment,” he says, and leaves.

When he returns, he’s carrying the crate from before.

“Ma cleaned out yours and Buck’s apartment.” He shifts to settle the crate back on the floor. “I went along to help.”

He fixes Steve with a look, and Steve feels the jolt of it to his bones.

“Roy--”

“It’s okay.” Roy’s struggling with the lid now, and it’s a moment before he manages to pry it free. “I didn’t want her to find out that way. And I didn’t want any of those army lumps coming around for it either.” He looks up, smiles a little. “They did try, though.”

There are sketchbooks and loose papers inside piled atop the pamphlets that had once been tacked to the walls of his and Bucky’s apartment, and the books that had once cluttered their shelves.

He pulls a sheet free: a charcoal line drawing; Bucky, in figure, pulling on a sock and standing bare except for his shorts.

Steve breaths out slowly through his nose.

“Thank you,” he says, and it’s not enough.

“Come visit, Steve, when you’re ready.” Roy hasn’t sat down again. “My Ma really does want to see you. Becca too.”

-

When he leaves Steve pulls apart the crate.

He spreads out the sheets in rows, the books go too, and a pair of ratty work pants that had once belonged to Bucky, but had then been appropriated by Steve. The Barnes’ must have kept Bucky’s good suit.

There are sketchbooks, and loose drawings, and a pamphlet of Republican songs from the Spanish Civil War.

This was all that remained of a life once shared. All the hopes, and dreams, and constant worries.

A tight hollowness has built up in his chest, somewhere behind his sternum. It chokes him.

There was a rally in ‘36. It was right after his mother had passed, and Bucky had gone without argument. Things were nebulus those days, new and unsteady. Someone had handed out the lyrics to _Viva la XV Brigada_ [ **12**] , and maybe Bucky was getting a little worried because he had pulled Steve close by the arm later and whispered fervently _You volunteer and I’ll follow you to Spain and skin you, you got it Rogers?_

And then he had kissed him, even though it was risky, in an alley off of Clinton St.

Steve hadn’t volunteered. Instead, they’d gotten the flat in a tenement in DUMBO that was four floors up and two square rooms: a kitchen with a bathtub shoved in the corner, and a bedroom.

There’s a drawing in one of the rows of Bucky playing pretend mechanic, and another that Steve had done of Bucky sitting in that kitchen in one of the rickety chairs. Steve’s hands shake slightly as he holds it up to the light. Bucky’s holding a newspaper in it, his brow furrowed, and naked as the day he was born. Steve had gotten down the dimple in his chin, the soft line of his cock against his thigh, and the way he always curled his toes around the legs of the chair.

He pulls a book from one of the cases that had come with the house-- _The Pictorial History of the Great War-_ and wonders briefly who had picked it out-- Peggy? Unlikely. Howard? Equally so.-- and begins carefully sliding the loose drawings between it’s pages. He lets his hand linger for a moment on its solid cover as he carefully replaces it on the shelf.

Steve breathes.

He saves the drawing with the newspaper. He saves the pamphlet of Republican songs too. He tucks them both in his night table between his mother’s rosary and the compass with the photograph of Peggy.

-

He takes up art again more seriously thereafter. Buying new sets of watercolours and a new box of charcoal. He draws Bucky in Havana, watching the Dodgers arrive for spring training. Bucky at Ebbets Field. Bucky as he was before the war, at a dance, laughing and sweaty.

Peggy notices, and he feels guilty.

He finds it difficult to put to words the sudden fear that has gripped him: fear of forgetting the sound of Bucky’s Brooklyn drawl, fear of forgetting the soft lines of his smile, or the calluses on the palms of his hands.

There was film footage out there somewhere. But it wasn’t the same. And the realisation hits with a sudden clarity that this was the closest he would be to Bucky again, that in all moments hereafter, his presence in Steve’s life would grow more distant. That eventually one day there would be few left who remembered him and Steve as part of the group of boys who had grown up around Montague and Clinton.

His mother had gone through the same; had gone through worse. A newborn baby and a dead husband, all in the span of a few weeks. Steve had never asked her how she had coped, or if she had ever ceased to mourn the man who was his father. He knew nothing of him besides the single photo tucked into the back of his mother’s Bible: a dark haired man, nondescript, looking like every other Irishman in Brooklyn. Steve saw nothing of himself in him. And yet, did his mother see his phantom lurking at every innocuous turn?

He misses her something fierce.

He draws her too, with her white nurse’s stockings and blue dress. She smiles from 1935, but he can’t shake the feeling that he didn’t get the face quite right.

-

The week before Howard flies out to Arizona is filled with incessant chatter. So-and-so was likely to be left off the 40-Man Roster. This guy was on the outs, this guy was on the ins. This guy was known for getting wildly drunk, and Howard planned to needle him for information on so-and-so.

Steve has other things on his mind.

“Do you know what they’re doing in the Allied managed zones of Germany?” He’s getting worked up, running angry hands through his hair. He sets his jaw. “They’re letting them go, Howard. They’re letting the Nazi bastards go because it helps their game against the Soviets.”

Howard hums under his breath, his arms tweaking at some wiring and his head bent forward over the innards of the machine. Steve hadn’t asked what it did.

“I go in the ice for what-- just over a year? And suddenly everyone forgets that the Soviets were our allies. Soviet snipers gave us cover when we worked on the Eastern front. They were our goddamn allies.” Steve says. He punches his palm to punctuate the words.

Howard does turn at that. Palms open with pliers dangling from the ring finger of his right hand.

“Steve-- I can call you Steve now, right? No more rank business nowt that we’ve officially won The War? Steve, pal, you need to get a hobby.”

Steve snorts at that even as his eyes burn. He can hear Bucky parrot the words back in ‘33 or ‘34, lying on the couch cushions in the Barnes’ living room.

“I mean it. Not that I don’t enjoy the company and occasional segues into theory of surplus value--” Steve does look up at that, and Howard cocks a grin. “-- I grew up on the Lower East Side I know what you pinkos are all about-- But that is to say, not that I don’t _enjoy_ it. But, pal, you’ve gotten nothing to lose if you just lighten up a little.”

And then he turns back to his wires, and the train of things seems to derail for a moment before Howard adds: “Peg tells me you draw? I’m in the market for an artist. Y’see, I got this little idea when I drove through Cali.” He pauses, lifting a screw and holding a length of wire in the corner of his mouth. “Get your people to send my people some of your things. Or just bring them next time you choose my workshop to brood in.”

Howard’s little idea, it turns out later, is film. He’s bought into a production company and uses Steve’s drawings to adorn the walls of his hero and heroine’s houses. The films are gaudy things, more fluff than substance. The actresses are all done up to the nines and the actors all have oiled moustaches and keep handguns in their jacket pockets.

Steve gets a proper paycheck from the gig, at the insistence of Howard. His art is used to adorn the walls of the set apartments and offices, and, one time, an old Western bar.

He dumps the money he earns into a fund for War Widows.

And then Howard stops by Tuesday evening and says, quite nonchalantly, “You got anything of Barnes?”

And Bucky, who Steve had teased for primping and preening as if he were Cary Grant, does make his way into film.

Steve draws him on the decks of yachts; dressed in linen suits and boater hats; riding in Buicks and Rolls Royce’s; and slouching fashionably, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, even though Bucky himself, out of deference to Steve’s asthma, had never smoked a cigarette in his life.

He gives him the life and security that neither could have dreamed of in their two-room tenement.

It feels more like an act of supplication than praying the rosary for Bucky ever had.

-

At the SSR, things plod on the same. Perhaps too much of the same.

What did Schmidt say in his last moments? Did he mention the Soviets? With all due respect, Captain Rogers, what _do_ you remember?

And the fact is this: he remembers exceedingly little about the weeks following Bucky’s death. He mistakes dates. He mistakes where he was, what he did, who he killed, who he let live.

What he had taken for a mere handful of days had actually been weeks. He fudges the date that he himself had taken down the plane.

“I’m losing it, Peg,” he tells her over lunch, scrubbing a weary hand over his face.

She’s careful when she speaks next, fiddling with her fork, “Trauma can warp memories.”

He doesn’t like that. The implication that he was so easily shaken.  He doesn’t like the fixation on finding new security problems either.

“Aren’t we focusing too much on the Soviets?” he asks, and knows immediately that it was the wrong thing to say.

“Is our national security a joke to you, Captain?” Thompson asks, with all the bravado of a man trying to shore up his rank on the proverbial food chain.

“No,” he says, because he’s rankled and can’t hide it. “But there are fascists fleeing Europe in droves, why aren’t we doing more? You fought in the war. You saw what they did.”

Thompson makes a face, and Steve realises he’s hit a nerve.

“I didn’t fight in Europe,” he says finally, carefully, his blonde head ducked. “I was in the Pacific. And I damn well learned to follow orders.”

It would all be very well if that were the end all of the problems, but the thing that rattles him, that has him gearing up for a fight, is that they don’t seem to treat Peggy particularly well at the Reserve.

“Don’t interfere,” she’d warned him. “I know you. I know you’ll want to. Trust me, this is the best way.”

Phillips had always been a bit of an ass. _Tough it out_ was his mantra. But Phillips had never set Peggy to filing cabinets or fetching coffee.

“You’re too good for this, Peg.”

And she looks at him, properly looks at him, and says simply: “So are you.”

  
**March, 1947**

Howard flies back from Arizona with a healthy tan and a million new stories under his belt. His pockets are well stocked with Cuban cigars, which he gifts to everyone, including Peggy.

“In tribute to Steve’s bad taste in America’s past-time,” he says grandly.

His stories seem to indicate that he’d spent the past weeks in varying states of inebriation with a good half of the Giants’ Forty-Man Roster, give or take.

So-and-so _isn’t_ , it seems, going to make the 40-Man Roster.

“The talk of the town though, Cap,” Howard says pointedly, finger raised. “Is that Robinson is going to get the call-up this year.”

Steve, for his part, follows the spring training story in the papers along with the increasing likelihood of a teacher walkout over wages. He even signs a statement in support of the Austin-Mahoney Bill when prompted to by some student protestors at the College.[ **13**]

Work at the SSR plods on.

It starts innocuously enough: venture into the SSR archives, pull down a box, add to its contents, and document, document, document every action.

Steve is the first to admit that it’s not particularly exciting, but he likes the regimentation of it. That he’s forced to wake up every weekday at a decent hour, he knows to get dressed, what to expect, he’s told when to eat. It keeps him from living in his head too much, something that was easy to fall into before the war when he was ill and feeling particularly sorry for himself, and something that proves particularly alluring now: not ill, but still feeling particularly sorry for himself.

There’s a box in the back dedicated to Project: Rebirth. There’s a photo of him in there from Camp Lehigh: scrawny and squinting off into the sun.

There are documents chronicling his entire history. His mother, his grandfather, who had died of diabetes, his uncle, who had died of influenza, his father, his father’s sisters.

There’s a file that notes that his mother was a republican sympathiser during the Easter Rising. Further pages which speculate that her involvement in the Rising was the reason for her emigration to the United States. There are notes on Steve’s political activities before the war. There are notes on Bucky’s dalliances with both men and women. There’s no mention of Steve’s

He closes the file and tucks it back into the box, which he carefully replaces on the shelf.

He recognises some of the other boxes. One on the SSR investigation of Howard the previous year, when he was under suspicion of selling weapons to foreign governments. And further back, behind those, numerous boxes with the names of Japanese cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and carefully numbered upward to twelve.

Steve frowns. Had the SSR had a branch on the Pacific front? He’d heard nothing of it during the war. Was that how Chief Thompson and become involved with the organisation?

He pulls one of the boxes free from where it’s wedged against the back wall of the shelving.

Inside there are just photos.

The first few are of fields of rubble, and on the reverse only the written coordinates of longitude and latitude. Then come the photos of charred ruins peaking forth from the fields of rubble: domed buildings that might once have housed government offices, or else the spindly remains of schools and shops. Places where people had lived their lives.

Even Dresden, with its charred bodies and roofless buildings, hadn’t looked so thoroughly destroyed.

The next box is filled with more photos. This time of children, women, old men. Some dead, some with faces warped with burns and scars. There’s a photo of a child crying while being treated by nurses.

The other boxes are the same. One is filled with newspaper reports on the _Atomic_ bombings. And this is something he’s never heard of before. How had he not known?

There’s another box filled with medical records detailing the examinations of bombing survivors. They’re clinical, the language betrays no emotion. Burns, anemia, sterility, severe scarring, cancers of all sorts.

His stomach churns.

So this is how war on the Pacific Front had ended. Blood rushes in his ears, and Bucky says “Steady on, Rogers.”, but Steve can’t think straight. How had he never bothered to ask? Shame chokes him, his hands shake, he’s angry to the point of recklessness.

He carries one of the boxes into Thompson’s office and plops it right down in the middle of his desk.

“Were any of you ever planning to tell me?” he spits.

Thompson is taken aback, he shifts forward in his leather-backed chair.

“What are you talking about, Rogers?”

“This,” Steve says, and upends the contents of the box over the table. The photos of radiation burns and mangled faces spill out onto its’ surface and over onto the floor.

He can see the moment that realisation dawns on Thompson, the sharp flicker in his eyes and the way his jaw clicks shut. He runs one hand through his pale hair and then scrubs it down over his face wordlessly.

“Rogers.” he says it like a warning. “You don’t know what you’re on about.”

“Tell me, then, Chief.” He’s raging now, and can’t stop. “Tell me, _Chief.”_

“Don’t you love the United States of America?” Thompson asks. “Don’t you understand freedom comes at a cost?”

“With all due respect, Jack. I love it’s people. I never pretended to love this goddamn government.”

He tosses his badge into a garbage bin on his way out.

-

It’s Tuesday. Howard stops by that evening in one of his carefully polished Aston Martins. He’s pulled off his tie and tugs at the collar of his shirt, revealing tanned skin.

“Can I interest you in a game of cards?” he says, grinning, and then, noticing Steve’s demeanor: “What’s eating you, Cap?”

What had been eating him was Howard’s name, tucked amongst the list of men that had worked on the Manhattan Project on the creation of Fat Man and Little Boy: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Howard Stark, Crawford Greenewalt… He wanted to scrub the damn the list from his brain. But he couldn’t unsee it. And unseeing it changed nothing except his own level of ignorance.

“What did you do after I went in the ice, Howard?”

“Thought you were going to tell me about the Soviets again, Cap.” he says as he fiddles with the rotary dial on Steve’s telephone. “Have you been talking to Carter?”

“What does Peggy have to do with this?”

Howard looks up at that, dark eyebrows drawn together: “Not sure we’re on the same page here, pal.”

“I saw your name in a file on the Atomic Bombs, Howard.”

Howard takes a step back as if slapped. Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t this.

“Look, Steve.” he says, hands raised placatingly. “I don’t know what you read, but I wasn’t the scientist who developed those bombs. I’m an engineer, I’m not a physicist.”

And Steve, who has never heard Howard downplay his own abilities before, feels the blood rush in his ears.

“Don’t lie,” he grinds his jaw around the words. “Don’t lie to me, Howard. I saw your name on the list.

Howard meets his eyes, but his gaze has gone cagey. He rubs one hand over the faint stubble on his chin, back and forth and back and forth. The fingers of his right hand dance over the buttons of his waistcoat.

“I didn’t work on the bomb,” he says finally, his words guarded. “I was asked to help develop a casing that could contain hypothetical atomic technology. I just did as I was told.”

“That bomb killed children- _children_ ,” it comes out wild and desperate. He tries to get a reign in on the anger, but it’s difficult. This same anger had gotten him beat up in more alleys and backlots than he could count. He would have taken that over this.

“It was us or them.” Howard bites the inside of his mouth. He drops the hand from his face. “It was our guys or them. Do you think I went out thinking I wanna kill a bunch of little fucking kids? It was a war, and I did what was asked of me, and I can’t take it back, can I?”

“There’s a difference. There’s a damn difference. Those kids couldn’t run away. They didn’t know what was happening. They were innocent. ” Steve looks at him, really looks at him. Because he wants Howard to tell him he knows. He wants him to be better. “Soldiers know what they’re getting into. They sign up for it.”

“Even Barnes?”

Steve stops, shaken.

“Even Bucky,” he says, finally, his throat tight.

“You’re a hard man, Steve,” Howard says, jaw tight and looking as weak as Steve feels.

And then, as he turns to leave, he looks Steve straight in the eye and says: “I’m sorry.”

-

He can’t sleep that night. He drowses only to be awakened with sweated-through sheets and the hair on the back of his neck prickling. There’s nothing wrong. Just murky rememberings of the War. Bucky falling or else Bucky somehow back after having fallen, alive, but gruesomely disfigured.

It’s been two years to the day since he crashed the plane. He’d thought that would be an end of it, and some fluke of Erskine’s had landed him back in a relatively unchanged Brooklyn like a fish out of water. He knew the streets better than he knew the back of his own hand, and yet it felt as he were living two existences simultaneously: the unceasing War which dogged his every step, and the incongruous present.

He spends his waking hours the following days turning one of his old sketches into a painting: Bucky in his shirtsleeves, leaning back onto the rail of the fire-escape, his tie whipped up by the wind. The sketch is dated 1934. Before he had worked up the courage to touch Bucky for the first time. Before his mother had passed away. Before everything that came after.

On the tenth of March, he carries it out under his arm to Clinton and Montague where he props it up on an easel and pays off a group of street kids to keep an eye on it, promising them each a quarter apiece if it was there untouched by the end of the day.

He finds Roy on his doorstep when he returns home.

“Steve,” he says, not bothering with a greeting. “You’re coming home today.”

“Roy-”

“Please.”

So he goes. They take the trolley back up to the Heights, and then three blocks west to the Barnes’ house.

He holds it together until he sees Rebecca.

“How dare you not come to us,” she says through tears, grabbing at the front of his jacket and shaking him. “How dare you?”

And the fact of it is that Bucky had been the end and beginning since he was six. He had been the one steady fixture through the Depression and fights, and the constant unremitting illnesses. Life had revolved, however unhealthily, around Bucky Barnes.

And yet, life hadn’t stopped when Bucky died. Here was Bucky’s family, without him.

Steve finds it hard to get a hold on himself for a long while.

“We didn’t want to pressure you,” Mrs. Barnes tells him later, stroking a hand through his hair,  as if he were still a child. “We wanted you to come on your own. You’re like a son to us.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, muffled, into his hands. “I took him from you.”

What he means to say is, it ought to have been me. He has no family. No mother to live the end of her days heavy with grief.

He’s been wearing the guilt of it like a cloak for every waking moment since the train. He’s dreamt it a thousand different times, a thousand different ways.

Mrs. Barnes’ hand is warm on his own, her face more lined than Steve remembered. She had always been the sterner parent, the one the Barnes children had listened to for fear of getting their ears tweaked.

“God had other plans for him,” she grips his hand firmly within her own. “And you can’t fight God, my dear.”

He has to smother a watery laugh at that, because Bucky comes to him vividly from sometime in the late 30s, all bark and no bite, spitting out “You’re stubborn and dumb enough that you’d fight God if you could.”

He doesn’t know how he stayed away for as long as he had.

In the evening it’s Becca who pours two fingers of whiskey into a glass tumbler and then hands it over to Charlie, who’s shot up over a foot since Steve had seen him last and had inherited, it seemed, Bucky’s primping and preening.

He leads them out of the house, his dark hair slicked back with a single jaunty curl left over his brow.

He stops when he reaches the edge of the pavement, eyes fixed on the tumbler, as Rebecca Barnes says, quite solemnly:

“Happy birthday, you great idiot. Lord only knows how many times you threw up in this gutter while you were drunk.”

She pours the whiskey down into it with no great ceremony, and only cries a little.

“Bucky always thought we wouldn’t know that he’d been out drinking,” George Barnes says later. “We knew. We were just more amused watching him try and act natural through the hangover.”

-

The painting is still there when he goes to collect it. There’s a gaggle of people around observing, and a photographer with a camera slung around his neck.

Steve waits in a parkette until the crowd has dissipated, then tucks the painting under his arm and heads home.

 -

There’s a single gunshot that night. It bounces off the storefronts on Clinton and echoes harshly down the alleyways. It’s followed by complete silence.

Steve, at home in Park Slope, hears nothing.

  
**April, 1947**

“Coffee, Steve?”

Peggy stands in the doorway in her dressing gown, hip cocked to the side.

Steve looks up from his painting and huffs an affirmative.

“Well,” she tucks a stray pincurl under her head-scarf. “I’ll put the water on then, shall I?”

He does eventually drag his feet from the room that’s been designated as a make-shift studio. He’s been on a tear the last two weeks, painting and painting. There’s so much paint caked under his nails that he wonders if it’ll ever wash out.

“Going well?” Peggy asks, lips curled around the rim of a coffee-cup.

He looks at her, really looks at her, and says “Going okay.”

She meets his gaze, strong, and fierce and unremitting. He loves her something awful. The way her eyes crease at the corners and the grey hairs that she dyes over. He likes the way her perfume smells when he tucks his face into the crook of her neck, or when the wind gusts at just the right degree.

He loves the way she has fit into his life without usurping the enormity of Bucky.

When she leaves for the SSR, pincurls brushed out and her lipstick applied, he goes back to painting: layering up browns and greens until Bucky takes form on the canvas, shaving his beard in a shard of found glass. The War had made scavengers of them all.

-

It becomes a ritual, finish a painting, and early in the morning, before the Borough has awakened, he tucks it under his arm and heads up to the Heights or DUMBO. Easel in tow, he leaves the paintings propped up outside Bucky’s frequent haunts as if they had sprung up like mushrooms. The dry-cleaners, the barber’s, Doherty’s Grocers, the tailor-shop where Mr. Hanley had repaired sock-garters and patched more pants than Steve cares to remember.

There’s even a brief write-up in the Eagle with photographs.

**TRIBUTE TO BROOKLYN’S FALLEN HERO**

He skips the article, just looks at the photos and feels more at peace than he has in a very long while.

-

It’s a Sunday when he sees Howard again.

He knocks instead of letting himself in, looking worse for the wear.

“I can’t change things,” Howard’s hair is in disarray, his eyes circled by dark shadows. “But I can try and make sure they never happen again. Tell me how, Steve. I’ve already poured money into reconstruction efforts-- hospitals, doctors, schools, whatever-- you name it. ”

“Money doesn’t fix everything, Howard. ”

“I know… I know.” He says tiredly, rubbing one hand across his eyes. Steve wonders when he last slept. “I’ve been talking to Peggy, we have some ideas. We have to do things right. We want you onboard. An organisation, like the SSR, but done _right_.”

“Okay.” Steve says dumbly. This was among the last things he was expecting.

Howard won’t stay the night, even though he looks unsteady on his feet. Instead, he smiles weakly up at Steve, and as he leaves, reaches up to pat him squarely on the chest: “You’ve got a big heart, Rogers.”

-

There are Dodgers opening day tickets in his mailbox the next morning. They’re not for the infield. They’re for the crowded outfield bleachers. The Dodgers are playing the Braves.

Steve smiles.

-

He takes Mrs. Barnes with him.

Jackie Robinson breaks the colour barrier that day. He plays first base and gets a walk. Steve cheers so loud that he’s hoarse for a week.

-

It’s not until late April that Peggy makes the trek into Brooklyn looking tense and wary.

“I have something to tell you,” she says, lips downturned. “Zola was found dead last month along with a Soviet doctor the SSR apprehended last year.”

Steve’s breath catches in his throat.

“What was Zola doing here?” he says carefully.

Peggy looks at him unflinchingly, “President Truman authorised a programme which recruits German scientists and engineers to work for the United States government to get an edge on the USSR. Zola was in SSR custody until late last year.”[ **14**]

Steve’s hands are shaking and his back has gone so rigid it hurts. If it would make any difference, he would tear everything to shreds. He swears, sharp and ugly. Because Arnim Zola had got off scot-free, even after all he had did to Bucky.

Steve remembers, with sick clarity, the way Bucky would awake screaming after Azzano.

“Nazi scientists?” he asks finally, voice shaking with barely concealed rage.

“Some,” says Peggy, jaw working.

He swears again, his mouth incapable of forming anything more coherent.

“Steve, darling.” Peggy says insistently. “I know you’re angry. You have every right to be. You’ve got to keep it together. We need to be careful about this. You’re not meant to know. And we can’t fight it properly if we’re compromised.”

“You sound like Buck,” he says, when he’s gotten a hold of himself and can speak again.

Peggy doesn’t say anything for a while, just breathes. It’s been a long time, he realises, since he’d said Bucky’s name aloud.

“He was a smart man, Steve.”

“Who killed them?”

“We don’t know. All hands are on deck now, so to speak. I was just brought on.”

“They did the world a favour.”

 

**May, 1947**

With the advent of spring, the city itself seems to awaken. Besides the Dodgers, and, across the East River, the Giants and Yankees, there’s a smallpox outbreak in April and a massive vaccination drive that follows. Steve attends a march against the Condon-Wadlin Bill[ **15**] , and joins a protest outside Governor Dewey’s office after he suggests that striking workers are communist agents.

He goes to Church on Sundays with the Barnes’ and sits with them in their usual pew. Afterwards there are Sunday lunches. Sometimes Bucky’s cousins will stop by, bringing a retinue of children with them. They were born in the later years of the War and care less about Captain America, and more about the fact that Steve can now throw a football _very_ far.

Bucky would have loved them. He’d always been better with children than Steve was.

“How’d they do it?” Tommy asks, looking at Steve’s bicep with incredulity. He’d served in the Air Force for the duration of the War and had come home relatively unscathed. He was responsible for a good half of the children currently tusseling on the grass.

“Experimental spinach extract,” Steve says seriously. “So much spinach extract.”

Tommy nods back solemnly.

-

Peggy has begun to spend more time at his house than she does her own. Becca has begged to be introduced, but Steve, out of some deep-seated awkwardness, has been reluctant to facilitate any meeting. 

“Soon,” he tells her, to put her off.

For the meantime, he continues as normal. He’s been trying his hand at cooking better, though, he thinks pointedly, it’s not like the English can complain about bad food-- he remembered what passed as English cuisene from the War. 

Tonight it’s spaghetti. He doesn’t take the onions off the burner before adding the tomatoes and ends up with a kitchen that looks like the scene of a crime.

Peggy, for her part, waits until they finish eating dinner before pulling out the actual crime photos.

“This is Dr. Fenhoff. He was shot at close-range with a sniper rifle. Only the aim wasn’t so good,” Peggy points to the bullet hole on the side of the neck. “The bullet hit his jugular, but didn’t kill him. He bled out eventually, after he’d dragged himself ten feet or so. 

She pulls out another photo and lays it in front of him.

Steve blows through his teeth in anger, “That’s Zola, all right.”

“The gun only had one shot loaded into it. This…” she bares her teeth. “Was the work of a knife. And whoever did it didn’t make a clean job of it, there’s signs of struggle.” She points to bruising around Zola’s eyes and in another photo, over his ribcage. “But once they got a hold of him, this person must have  _ sawed _ .” 

Steve sorts through the photos, both of the crime scene and autopsy. Corpses had lost their fear-factor over the course of the war and were instead met with grim indifference.

“What are you thinking?” he asks slowly.

“The killings don’t match the signatures of any opened cases in the country. We’ve got several branches and sent out a call for information. But we’re not ruling out the Mob,” she tilts the photo of Zola’s splayed body in her hand. “There’s the possibility of Nazis who fled Germany after the war-- that doesn’t explain Fenhoff but perhaps he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?” 

“HYDRA didn’t organise such messy kills,” he supplies.

“No, no…” she tilts the photo again, eyebrows bunching. “Whoever did it knew how to handle a gun at least. The pushback of the rifle didn’t stop them from killing Zola. Of course, all this doesn’t rule out that it was a random attack, but…”

“No,” Steve says, looking at Zola’s neck, sawed through to the bone. “This feels personal.”

-

On Tuesday, Howard comes by. 

He’s looking better since Steve saw him last, although his language is a lot filthier. The Giants had gotten off to a cool start, winning only six of their first fifteen games. 

“The Dodgers have gone 10-6,” Steve supplies helpfully. 

Howard swears impressively.

Their usual card game is replaced by Howard pulling files out of his briefcase. There are folders upon folders of budget proposals and calculations, personnel to hire, mandates and guidelines. 

“We have to be careful,” Howard says, echoing Peggy. “But with Peggy’s pretty face and prettier words and my connections, I think we can pull some strings.”

Steve, who has never seen Howard serious about anything, is surprised. 

“We’ve got initial plans.” Howard rifles around for another folder. “We’ve got to start small, focus on localised issues. But we’ve got plans for branching out, expansions and divisions and making sure that all eyes, so to speak, are focused on justice. I want to make things right, pal.” 

-

He tells Peggy about it the following day, as the Dodgers game rumbles on the wireless.

“Howard is very fond of you,” she says, meeting the gaze.

And he remembers Bucky, from the War, a million years ago, eyeing Howard and saying “That man is bent as a three-dollar-bill. Trust me.” He doesn’t tell Peggy about that. He won’t ever tell Howard, either. It changes nothing.

-

He finishes the painting: Bucky looking into a shard of glass and shaving the stubble from his chin. It was a scene that had reenacted itself hundreds of times over the course of the war. Using the same sliver of soap for shaving as for washing one’s ass was, however, not one which Steve ever cared to repeat.

And he’d never again take for granted the luxury of a sharpened razor. 

He packs up the painting, tucks it under his arm, and grabs an easel. It’s been getting lighter earlier, but there are still very few people out. Only the old Great War veteran on his front porch, as he is every morning. Steve waves to him, he waves back, and then continues with his sunflower seeds and crosswords. 

The flowers have begun to poke their heads clear of the earth, and Steve opts to walk to the Heights instead of taking the tram. It’s become soothing, walking at one’s own pace without a timed mission or lives on the line. It’s been a long time since he could simply amble.

And he does. He detours by the Brooklyn Museum, just to see it lit up in the morning light, and to smell the green of the park beyond it in the air. 

The shop-fronts are just rumbling open when he arrives. He’s known the faces behind them his entire life. He sets the painting up in front of the barber’s where Bucky had gone for his regular cut and shave, and where, now, their childhood friend Jim Delaney, nicknamed Boots, worked.

He’s been thinking of moving back. Not to DUMBO, that was still painful, but back to the streets where his mother had carted around her nurses bag, and where Bucky had broke his arm at age 12, where Steve had gotten into more fights than he could ever hope to count. 

It would be closer to the Barnes’, and maybe Peggy would come too, once he finally worked up the courage to ask her to marry him. 

Men slumped over in alleyways sleeping off hangovers are such a common occurance here that he doesn’t stop when he sees one out of the corner of his eye. He’s halfway between weighing the benefits of going to the grocer’s or going to Ebbets instead when a strong hand yanks him back.

“What the  _ fuck _ ,” says the man, gesturing with a knife to out of the alley in the direction Steve had came from, “is  _ that? _ ”

And Steve, for all his years of getting into fights, has never actually been knifed in Brooklyn. He’s fixated on it’s dirty blade, running through scenarios to knock it out of the man’s hand. It’s a beat before he looks to the man’s face

“Bucky?” his insides have run cold, because he’s lost it. 

“Who the hell is Bucky?” says Bucky, and then goes down, hard.

-

He calls Howard from a payphone, because he doesn’t know anyone else with a car.

He’s half-hysterical, more than half-incoherent. Although he did have the sense to make sure that Bucky, with his dirty long underwear and shaved head, was breathing.

There’s a scar running from the length from his ear to the crown of his head. It’s red, and ugly, and bowls Steve over. Because if this were a hallucination, his brain was doing a pretty damn bad job of historical accuracy. 

Howard is more outwardly shaken that Steve. He helps Steve get Bucky into the backseat with a constant stream of curses.

He gets into the driver’s seat, and then chokes up.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“I don’t--” Steve stars. Stops. His insides have gone funny. “A hospital? A doctor?” 

Howard puts the car into gear, and  _ drives.  _

-

Peggy comes to the hospital. Howard must have called her.

“Steve,” she says, and he can see that she’s shaken. She clings to the handle of her handbag. “Steve.”

“Zola,” he says, finally, voice cracking. “The experiments. Something must have helped him survive the fall.” 

Peggy takes a seat heavily next to him. 

“I didn’t go after him because it wasn’t something that any normal man could come back from,” he says, and then chokes. “His left arm is gone, all that’s left is a stump to here,” he gestures to his bicep, just above the elbow.

“Steve, nobody could have known.”

“He didn’t know who I was. The only thing he recognised was his own damn face in the painting.” 

“Dr. Fenhoff-- the doctor who was with Zola, he can--” Peggy hesitates, eyes flashing in the direction of the smoking room where Howard is trying to nicotine away the jitters. “--he’s very adept at manipulating people. He can make them forget where they are-- who they are.”

“Do they come back?”

“If we get to them in time,” Peggy says, jaw tensing. “Yes. But Zola… the human experimentation? I don’t know how it fits in, Steve.” 

-

He prays more than he has since his mother was ill. He prays constantly, head bowed, over the side of the hospital bed, and thinks of Howard, mirrored in the same position, months before. 

-

He phones the Barnes’. 

 

**June, 1947**

Steve stretches his hand. He flexes his fingers and Bucky, always a quip dancing at the tip of his tongue these days, snorts.

“Tired, Steve?” he says, voice hoarse. “Because it feels like I’m the one doing all the work around here.”

Steve rolls his eyes pointedly, and picks up the stick of charcoal again. He drags it down across the page, chasing the shape of Bucky’s jawline and the jut of his shoulders.

They’ve been fitting him with prosthetics the last week, and he draws that too, the straps around his shoulder and stump, and the joint of the false elbow. 

Bucky is tired mostly these days, and is happy enough to snooze in the chair by the window, his face tilted to the sun. His hair has started to grow back, and the ends of it catch the sun, turning gold.

Steve doesn’t bother to try to pretend he isn’t staring. There’s sweat shining on Bucky’s brow, and the hair around his ears is damp. Steve wants to press his face to it and breath in, so he does.

“Get off me,” Bucky says. “I’m an invalid.”

He stops complaining when Steve kisses him.

Later, sketchpad forgotten, Steve says: “It feels like a miracle.” 

And Bucky rolls his eyes, and simply says: “Is your girl coming for dinner?”

“Yeah, she is.”

“Good.” 

-  
Footnotes:  
1 Betty and Bob was the most popular radio soap of the 1930s. The soap followed the day-to-day lives of Betty, a secretary, and Bob Drake, her bachelor boss with whom she was in love. You can listen to an episode of the soap **[here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaeqWFGvcSo)** [1]  
2 1934 was the year that Dodgers pitcher Walter Beck would acquire the nickname "Boom Boom". As the nickname might suggest, he had a less than stellar season. You can read about him **[here](http://www.banishedtothepen.com/record-index-the-misfortune-of-boom-boom-beck/)** [2]  
3The 21 Club was a dining club established in 1922 and which may still be visited at 21 West 52nd Street in Manhattan  
4 Bal, or Balboa, is a type of swing dance that originated in Calfornia whose crowded dance floors made dancing lindy-hop difficult, and sometimes outright banned the characteristic lindy-hop swing-out. You can see what Bal looks like **[here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O65KqT0Vby8)** [4]  
5 Mark Kaminski is a man whose name was on the list of Howard Stark's ex-lovers on Agent Carter. You can see the aforementioned props & some discussion of it on my twitter **[here](https://twitter.com/victoriapopov/status/1003349607806586880?s=19)** [5]  
6 Manhattan Serenade is just **[a really gorgeous song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MvqRvxbRoE)** [6]  
7Stork Club lucky pennies were available for purchase at the Stork Club gift-shop. They looked like **[this](http://www.brianrxm.com/comdir/cnstokmed_storkclub.htm)** [7]  
8This actually happened. It's one of the most notorious World Series goofs in baseball history. [8]  
9Jackie Robinson first played for the Montreal Royals, the Triple-A Affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers. If you want a good cry, you can read about Jackie's time playing in Canada **[here](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/jackie-robinsons-wife-remembers-a-welcoming-montreal/article11602715/)** [9]  
10Howard is a New York Giants fan, which was the oldest of the three New York ballclubs, and the club for which more "old" Manhattanites rooted for. The Yankees were the young upstarts that were rooted for by the Rich and tourists. [10]  
11 The merger of the boroughs of New York into a single city. Dubbed 'The Great Mistake of '98' by generations of resentful Brooklynites.[11]  
12 **[A Spanish Civil War Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fko5fYIBJFU)** [12]  
13A bill which would have made discrimination on the basis of "race, religion, color, national origin or ancestry" in educational institutions illegal in New York.[13]  
14It was called Operation Paperclip, and was a real programme. [14]  
15 The Bill passed in 1947 & called for the firing of public sector employees who stricked. Also implemented a 3 year pay freeze on them & 5 years of probation.[15]

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading ❤  
>   
> If you enjoyed the fic & would consider reblogging it, you can find it on tumblr **[here.](http://themastersbeard.tumblr.com/post/175395127092/a-quiet-front-on-ao3-art-by-curious-werewolf)**
> 
> I used two resources extensively: the digitized archives of the Brooklyn Eagle and baseball-reference.com. 
> 
> The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn was an invaluable source not only on the Dodgers, but on the baseball culture in New York at large. 
> 
> The documentary 'The Ghosts of Flatbush' was also particularly helpful in evoking the Dodgers nostalgia. If you're interested, it may be viewed in full on YouTube. 
> 
> The title of the work was taken from a poem by John Cornford, the great-grandson of Charles Darwin, who died age twenty-one fighting as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War:  
>   
> This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.
> 
> We buried Ruiz in a new pine coffin,  
> But the shroud was too small and his washed feet stuck out.  
> The stink of his corpse came through the clean pine boards  
> And some of the bearers wrapped handkerchiefs round their faces.  
> Death was not dignified.  
> We hacked a ragged grave in the unfriendly earth  
> And fired a ragged volley over the grave.
> 
> You could tell from our listlessness, no one much missed him.
> 
> This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.  
> There is no poison gas and no H. E.
> 
> But when they shelled the other end of the village  
> And the streets were choked with dust  
> Women came screaming out of the crumbling houses,  
> Clutched under one arm the naked rump of an infant.  
> I thought: how ugly fear is.
> 
> This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.  
> Our nerves are steady; we all sleep soundly.
> 
> In the clean hospital bed, my eyes were so heavy  
> Sleep easily blotted out one ugly picture,  
> A wounded militiaman moaning on a stretcher,  
> Now out of danger, but still crying for water,  
> Strong against death, but unprepared for such pain.
> 
> This on a quiet front.
> 
> But when I shook hands to leave, an Anarchist worker  
> Said: ‘Tell the workers of England  
> This was a war not of our own making  
> We did not seek it.  
> But if ever the Fascists again rule Barcelona  
> It will be as a heap of ruins with us workers beneath it.’


End file.
